QBE Builders Warranty Insurance

Let's see how they go – Home owners warranty can be claimed by the property owner if their builder, whom the insurer has backed by approving the insurance and accepting the premium; fails to complete work or if there are defects and the builder cannot be made to rectify because he is dead disappeared or insolvent or or if there is an unpaid court order. Claim submitted; process just started so only a neutral 3 star rating so far. A little slow getting going, but we will see how it goes. If it goes great we will report that. If it goes bad then we will report that too. We hope that we have only wonderful things to report!

27 October 2016 Update:

Our claim is now finished and paid. Here’s how it went:

It took a very substantial effort to put the claim together, working late into the night, many hours for many nights, over several weeks. You definitely want to avoid this –especially if paying a lawyer over $300/hour to prepare your claim. It was surprisingly difficult to consolidate from the QBE information on how I should structure the claim and calculations. They should provide clearer guidelines or templates.

From the date QBE confirmed receipt of our claim it took a total of 201 days until payment. It is worthwhile going into some of the details….

After I called QBE and confirmed they received my claim, it took QBE a further 13 days to write and acknowledge receipt. The officer that wrote, advised the wrong receipt date, being about a week after the other guy confirmed receipt. A minor glitch - but a sign of things to come.

Another thing the letter stated was : “QBE Insurance (Australia) Limited is obliged to make a decision on the claim within 90 days of this letter in accordance with the relevant statutory requirements however we will endeavour to issue a decision as soon as practicable.” I Iater learned that the QBE advice conflicted with the HBCF claims information guide for homeowners that instead states: “The Insurance Agent will either accept or deny the claim and should endeavour to do so within 30 days after receipt of all Prescribed Claims Information”.

QBE soon sent an inspector from CRD ([name removed]) to examine the house relative to the claim. He was very good and thorough, going over my house for several hours with some fancy gadgets. He was to recommend to QBE what to accept and not accept.

It took 83 days from the date of claim receipt for QBE to provide a document listing what they accept and what they reject. The long awaited document was a dog’s breakfast with many blatant errors. And it even omitted several important claim items. It was also ridiculously difficult to relate the items in the QBE document back to the items in our claim so it was very difficult to identify those omissions.

That QBE officer also told me that the document would be provided to builders to tender on and he pressured me to accept it as it was, saying that QBE wanted to settle quickly and implying there would be further delays if I did not just accept it. I told him that his document was no good and that if it was sent to builders they would be utterly confused by it and this would lead to either under or over quoting.

I also questioned the value of a tender and pointed out that it would add more time to the already delayed process. He said a tender would take about 2 months. The conflict in their desire to go out to tender with a crap document and their desire to “settle quickly” was disturbing. He attempted to assuage my discontent by letting me know that I could get my own builder to quote, presumably because it may speed things up, but I told him that no builders I have met so far want to touch it or give a fixed price. When I asked if a tender would even get the cost down, the QBE officer could not advise. But he did confirm that their consultant had already advised them that the claim amount will far exceed the limit. Our consultant advised the same thing. I told him that a tender seemed rather pointless but he just did not get it. I asked several other questions that the officer avoided answering.

The policy requires the homeowner to take steps to protect the house from further damage, but when I asked our officer and another one to clarify whether our costs to fulfill that duty and rectify defects would be covered I could not get a straight answer. So you become slowed by this, becoming unwilling to go full speed on fixing the house before settlement in case repair expenses will not be properly covered.

It took me 15 days to review their document and detail the errors and respond. When QBE received it, my QBE officer called and again implied that I was being difficult and if he had to read through my response there would be further delays. He pressured me to just accept his original document. After that I decided to submit a complaint to the QBE complaints handling department.

It took QBE 19 days to send back their revised document – but while the blatant errors had been corrected, it was now worse than before! Argghhh! My claim progress seemed to be going backwards. It took me a long time to work out how to resolve what was looking to become an impasse with a bureaucratic bungler. And by now I was also very busy with other things and could not commit a block of time to sit and review it fully and respond yet again. I was able to respond to their 2nd document 62 days later and that took several long nights of effort.

By now the QBE complaints officer was involved in this case and ten days after my response QBE provided a settlement offer - with no tender! I signed it the next day and the clam was soon paid. While they paid the claim, as they should, I rate the overall process as "bad".